Where AWS, Azure and Google Cloud candidates can find genuinely free practice questions and mock exams, what each source covers, and what free gets you.
Free cloud practice tests exist for all three major platforms, and some of the best come straight from the vendors themselves: Microsoft publishes free official Practice Assessments on Microsoft Learn, AWS offers free official practice question sets through its Skill Builder platform, and Google Cloud's exam pages link official exam guides that define exactly what to practise. Around that official layer sits a second tier of free third-party question sources — including ExamPractice's free samples — that widen your question exposure without widening your budget.
The catch is that "free" spans everything from rigorously maintained official assessments to abandoned quiz sites keyed to retired exam versions. This guide maps the free options platform by platform, tells you what each is genuinely good for, and flags where free coverage runs out. It stays on cloud turf: general IT certifications have their own round-up in where to find free IT practice tests, and the cross-domain ranking of free resource types lives in the best free certification practice resources.
AWS Skill Builder. AWS's own training platform includes free official practice question sets alongside its paid tiers — the closest thing to practising against the examiner's own style. Question sets exist for the popular certifications, and because AWS writes them, they track current exam versions. Check availability for your specific exam on Skill Builder itself, as the catalogue changes.
Official exam guides with sample questions. Each AWS certification page links an exam guide PDF specifying the domains, question format and scoring. For the Cloud Practitioner exam this is worth reading even before you practise: the guide states that the exam has 65 questions in 90 minutes, that 50 are scored and 15 are unscored pilot items, that unanswered questions count as incorrect, and that there is no penalty for guessing. Free practice is far more useful once you know those rules — they mean, for instance, that you should always answer every question in a mock run.
Free third-party samples. ExamPractice publishes free sample practice questions with per-question answer reveal on its AWS exam pages — see the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 page or browse the wider Amazon exams hub; fuller question sets and a timed simulation mode are available to subscribers.
A version warning specific to AWS. Free content lingers online long after exams change. As of August 2026 the current versions are CLF-C02 for Cloud Practitioner and SAA-C03 for Solutions Architect Associate; the SysOps exam has been renamed CloudOps Engineer (SOA-C03), and the Machine Learning Specialty retired in March 2026. Free questions labelled CLF-C01, SOA-C02 or MLS-C01 are practising you for exams you can no longer sit.
Microsoft is the most generous of the three vendors here.
Free official Practice Assessments on Microsoft Learn. Microsoft publishes free Practice Assessments for exams including Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900), directly on the certification pages. They are official, current, and repeatable — the obvious first stop for any Azure candidate, and a benchmark other free sources should be judged against.
The exam sandbox. Microsoft also provides a free exam sandbox — a demonstration of the exam interface and question styles. It tests no knowledge, but removes the interface surprise factor, which matters more than candidates expect on question types like drag-and-drop and case studies.
Free third-party samples. ExamPractice's Microsoft exams hub carries free sample questions across Azure exams, including role-based exams such as AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator, useful for widening exposure beyond the official assessment's question pool.
An Azure-specific caution. Microsoft retired roughly a dozen role-based certifications between 2025 and 2026 — AZ-204, AI-102 and DP-100 among them, with AZ-500 retiring on 31 August 2026 — and replaced the AI-900 exam with AI-901. Free Azure practice content is disproportionately likely to target these retired exams because they were popular. Before practising for any Azure exam, confirm on Microsoft Learn that the certification is still live; safe current targets include AZ-900, AZ-104, AZ-305, AZ-700, SC-200, SC-300, PL-300 and DP-700.
Google Cloud's free official layer is thinner: its exams (which carry names rather than codes — there is no "GCP-ACE" exam code) publish exam guides on each certification page, and those guides are the authoritative statement of what to practise. Google discloses only pass/fail results with no published passing score, so no practice source can honestly tell you "you need 70%" — treat any free test claiming a Google Cloud passing percentage as a credibility red flag.
That makes third-party free questions relatively more important for Google Cloud candidates than for Azure ones. Wherever you source them, hold them to the current exam guide: Google renames products frequently and has been updating exams accordingly — the Professional Machine Learning Engineer exam, for example, now reflects the shift from Vertex AI toward the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and the Cloud Digital Leader exam was recently refreshed. Free questions still built around old product names will read wrong against the live exam. ExamPractice's all-exams directory is the quickest way to check which Google Cloud exam pages carry free samples.
Vetting an unfamiliar free site before trusting its questions is a skill of its own — the trust signals and red flags are covered in how to tell if an online exam resource is trustworthy.
Free question sources, used well, cover three of the four jobs practice tests do:
The fourth job — a realistic, full-length, timed readiness benchmark — is where free coverage usually runs out. Free tiers tend to offer smaller question pools without a timed simulation of the real exam's length and pressure. That final rehearsal is the one stage where paying something can be rational: once free resources have carried you through the domains, a timed full-length practice-test simulation will tell you whether you are ready to book, and which domains need one more pass.
A candidate preparing for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam — a $100 USD, foundational, no-prerequisites exam — can sensibly spend nothing at all until late in preparation: exam guide first, free Skill Builder question sets and free samples for diagnosis and drilling, and only then decide whether a paid full-length simulation is worth it for the final readiness check. An Azure Fundamentals candidate can lean even harder on free material thanks to the official Practice Assessment. A Google Cloud candidate should budget more scepticism than money: the free layer is thinner, so quality-checking third-party sources matters more. And a systematic method for locating and vetting further free resources — beyond the named sources here — is laid out in how to find reliable free exam preparation resources.
Are vendor practice questions the same difficulty as the real exam?
Vendors design official practice material to reflect the live exam's style, but no practice score converts directly to a real score — real exams use scaled scoring (AWS passes at 700–720 on a 100–1,000 scale depending on level) and include unscored pilot questions, so expect your live result to diverge somewhat from practice percentages.
Can I pass a cloud exam using only free practice tests?
Free practice tests alone rarely suffice for anyone — they test knowledge rather than build it. Paired with free official training material and the exam guide, a disciplined candidate can certainly prepare for a foundational exam without paid resources; associate-level and professional exams usually reward hands-on platform time above all.
Do free practice tests exist for the professional-level cloud exams?
Coverage thins as exams get harder. Official free material concentrates on foundational and associate tiers; for professional exams (such as AWS Solutions Architect Professional or Google Cloud's Professional Cloud Architect, whose exam includes case studies), expect free sources to cover fewer questions and lean more on the official exam guides.
Is it cheating to use practice tests?
No — practising against questions written to the public exam objectives is exactly what providers expect. What violates policy is using leaked live exam content; steer clear of any source marketing itself that way.
Start with the vendor: exam guide, then Microsoft's Practice Assessments or AWS's free Skill Builder question sets for your exam. Add free third-party samples — ExamPractice's exam pages among them — to widen question exposure and drill weak domains. Verify everything against the current exam version, since 2025–2026 reshuffled all three vendors' line-ups. Save any spending for the end, when a timed full-length simulation answers the only question free resources leave open: are you ready to book?
Exam facts in this guide were checked against official certification-provider pages on . Fees, exam codes and policies change — confirm on the provider’s own site before you book.
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